Monday, August 10, 2015

When we started
Get My Graphic, the vision was to empower our customers to achieve their
goals using powerful visuals. Today I’m happy to let you know about the
exciting next step in this goal. Get My Graphic has been acquired by eLearning Brothers, LLC. This acquisition supercharges what our customers can do
by offering more graphics than we ever imagined. It also opens up two
more amazing products: a Cutout People Image Library and a Stock Image Library. This acquisition will give you the tools you need to continue making amazing presentations.

Founded in 2009, eLearning Brothersis
a global provider of eLearning templates and assets, custom eLearning
design, and training for eLearning professionals. They are based in the Salt Lake
City area (American Fork) of Utah, USA, with 50+ employees.

It was a hard decision to sell our service, since we grew this business
from the ground up. However, we wanted to expand our graphic offerings,
and eLearning Brothers has the resources and talent to continue
servicing our clients at the level they expect while providing a large
and diverse range of visual solutions.

We are very excited about eLearning Brothers taking over the reins of Get My Graphic, which is now Get My Graphics.
Through this new site, our clients will have access to a diverse range
of visuals with which to communicate their ideas. We will continue to
work with eLearning Brothers over the next year to add new PowerPoint
graphics to their collection. We'll also be available to help eLearning
Brothers and our clients with this transition. Our original site, Get My Graphic, will continue to operate until we have transitioned all clients to the new Get My Graphics site.

Below is information for our current clients about the acquisition and transition. You should receive an email or phone call from eLearning Borthers with these details.

What do you need to know/do:

Yearly Subscription Customers (Active)

If you were an active yearly subscriber (paid up front in full) on
the original Get My Graphic site, then your account has been upgraded! It now
includes:

The PowerPoint Graphic Library (This is the original Get My Graphic site offering)

The Cutout People Library. That’s over 25,000 images already cutout and
ready to use.

Depending on the size of your account you might have also
received the:

The Stock Images Library. Over 1,000,000 royalty free images/graphics of anything you can imagine.

You will receive an email with your new, randomly generated password.
Use that, along with your email address as your username, to log in,
check out the new offering, and start downloading.

Monthly Subscription Customers (Active)

If you were an active monthly subscriber on the previous Get My Graphic site, then your account has been upgraded! It now includes:

The PowerPoint Graphic Library (This is the original Get My Graphic site offering)

The Cutout People Library. That’s over 25,000 images already cutout and ready to use.

The Stock Images Library. Over 1,000,000 royalty free images/graphics of anything you can imagine.

You will receive an email with your new, randomly generated
password. Use that, along with your email address as your username, to
log in, check out the new offering, and start downloading.

Important: Your credit card information will need
to be entered. We are using a new payment processor, and old credit card
information was not transferred over. Please login to your account member.GetMyGraphics.com (note
the “s”) and click on the “Subscriptions” tab. Click the “Details” link
for the subscription that is about to expire. On the right side of the
screen add a new card. Finally, click the green “Enable Auto-Renewals”
button.

Now you’re all set.

Monthly Subscription Customers (Expired)

If you had a monthly subscription on the original Get My Graphic site we
invite you to check out the new offering. You’ll find all of the same
great PowerPoint Graphics plus even more!

Customers that Purchased Credits (NO remaining credits)

If you purchased credits on the original Get My Graphic site, and used
all of them, you will receive an email with your new, randomly generated
password. Use that, along with your email address as your username, to
log in, check out the new offering, and start downloading.

Customers that Purchased Credits (with remaining credits)

If you purchased credits on the original Get My Graphic site, and
still have a remaining credit balance, then your account has been
upgraded! You now have one month’s access to unlimited downloads of the
PowerPoint graphics that you have come to know and love.

You will receive an email with your new, randomly generated
password. Use that, along with your email address as your username, to
log in, check out the new offering, and start downloading.

Free Customers

If you had a free account on the original Get My Graphic site, you are
eligible for the 7-day free trial on the new GetMyGraphics site. Take a
look at our subscriptions, choose which one you would like, and get
started!

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us or call 801-796-2767

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

This week on our blog, we have a virtual interview with Rick Altman, the man behind the Presentation Summit. If you want to learn amazing and helpful presentation tricks and best practices that will blow the socks off your audience, then check out the Presentation Summit this year in New Orleans, LA, from Sept. 27-30. It's a must-attend event for anyone wanting to take their presentations to the next level of success. And because he's an awesome guy, Rick is giving our readers$75 OFF the conference price for a limited time. Enter NOLA75 in the client code field when you register online.

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BDG (Mike Parkinson): What can attendees expect to get out of the Presentation Summit? What will they learn?

Rick Altman: We cover the whole of the presentation experience: message crafting, presentation design, slide creation, software technique, and delivery. We cover all of this through seminars, workshops, discussions, and a hands-on help center.

BDG: By software, you mean PowerPoint?

RA: Yes, but not exclusively. We acknowledge that 99% of our patrons use PowerPoint, but not only PowerPoint. They need to know about complementary software like image-editing and graphic apps, charting tools, plug-ins and add-ins, and cloud-based services. And they need to know about the alternatives to PowerPoint, as well. You might not be destined to become, say, Prezi users for life, but you would still benefit from knowing its value and the scenario in which you might want to turn to it. And hey, if you end up converting to a PowerPoint alternative because it's the better tool for you and we're the ones who exposed you to it, that's a win-win.

BDG: How does the Presentation Summit differ from other conferences?

RA: Because we have great people like you attending!

BDG: (Laughs) Okay, besides that!

RA: In all seriousness, that's not far from the truth. I think the world of the conference-attending public. They seek to enrich their lives with educational experiences and to step outside of their comfort zones and their daily routines. Those are truly wonderful qualities to have, so I am predisposed to liking people who attend conferences. But many conferences offer just the learning component, and if they are in the range of 500-600 people, they are impersonal by nature. These cool people often don't get to be themselves at typical business conferences.

BDG: You prefer smaller conferences?

RA: Yes, I do–we think 200 patrons is perfect. We can be much more personal with them, and in so doing, we encourage our patrons to be themselves. If you take all of these good people with warm personalities who attend conferences, and you give them an opportunity to let all of their good qualities surface, you end up with a magnificent community of folks who create an almost-magical atmosphere. They truly enjoy meeting one another, and they learn almost as much from those interactions as they do from our experts. They become part of a support network of peers that they never knew existed, and we've seen that network grow stronger year over year, to the point where people who have met at the conference now consider themselves life-long friends.

BDG: Every year at the Summit, I look forward to geeking out with people passionate about presenting
like I am and reconnecting with my presenter pals. Your conference is filled with folks in the presentation
field at all levels of their careers from beginner to expert. I've
learned something new each time I attended. What are you most excited about this year?

RA: Got an hour? When you only hold one conference a year, you get excited very easily.

BDG: Yes, you are notorious for that.

RA: And I wear it as a badge of honor. So for this year, we are thrilled—can I say that we are jazzed?—to be returning to the French Quarter of New Orleans, after having gone there in 2007, just two years after Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is a magical city to visit, and we have a wonderful hotel, the Astor Crowne Plaza, right at the foot of Bourbon St.

BDG: How will you get people to go to class?

RA: (Laughs) They're all grown-ups. They make up their own minds about how they spend conference time.

BDG: They'll go—we've seen your speaker lineup.

RA: And that's the next thing I'm excited about—we have awesome keynoters and several new session leaders. I've been trying to get Guy Kawasaki for nearly a decade, and this year, all the planets aligned to enable him to join us on the Tuesday of conference week. I'm also really looking forward to meeting Keith Harmeyer of SmartStorming fame. His ideas about creative thinking are inspirational. And we welcome several very talented young artists to our team.

BDG: Young? That's unusual for you to make an observation about age.

RA: I know, but I'm north of 50 now, and we're beginning to see patrons who are half my age. That can't be ignored! They bring a fresh and dynamic perspective to the conference, and it is both invigorating and scary.

BDG: Scary? How is it scary?

RA: What if I can't keep up? What if they all see me as an old codger or something?

BDG: I refuse to answer that question.

RA: I suppose that will be the time to retire.

BDG: Not anytime soon, I hope!

RA: No, not anytime soon. This is too much fun.

BDG: What else do you want to say before you retire?

RA: Come to the Presentation Summit this fall to meet a bunch of people who are just as cool as you.

BDG: Thanks, Rick, for taking the time to chat with us. If you want to hear more from Rick and experience his energetic style, check out his interview below. Remember to enter NOLA75 in the client code field to save $75 when you register online for the Presentation Summit.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Last week, I presented at the ATD International Conference and Exposition to a crowd of over 300 trainers and talent development professionals. Talk about a lot of pressure! They were excited to learn how to make infographics fast, and they took the challenge to create their own infographic at the end of the class.

Here's an overview of my session for those who missed it:

Graphics are known to communicate information faster, be more memorable, improve learning, and increase your likelihood of success. The process of creating infographics comprises 50% concepting and 50% rendering.

Before you render, you need to understand your concept. Write down your thoughts regarding these three main factors:

Know your audience. You wouldn't use the same images or text in an infographic intended for middle school students as you would for financial planners. What graphic styles and images speak to your audience? What questions would they want answered about your concept?

Know your message. What should your audience learn from your graphic? What is the benefit to your audience? Take a cue from Albert Einstein, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

Know how to explain or prove. Once you understand your message, then you need to prove it to the audience by providing metrics or explaining how your concept affects or benefits them.

After you've jotted down answers about your concept, then it is time to draw your concept.

Assemble your concepts. Review what you've highlighted. How can they be assembled to tell a story? How do they relate to each other? Can you assemble them into blocks that align like a pyramid or maybe steps in a process chart?

Practice makes better infographics, so I challenged the class to create an infographic based on what I'd taught them.

Here's a sampling of the graphics rendered by the class. Quite impressive considering they had five minutes to create these:

Then one student went to the head of the class and completely rendered his graphic after the workshop. Thanks to Dan Gorgone, Instructional Designer at MarketingProfs, for this awesome infographic. He made this instructor very proud.